Walking the Demon Tunnel

by Kiel Stuart

She had been walking the demon tunnel for years.

The tunnel was narrow, claustrophobic. If she stood in the middle, she could almost touch the sides.

Demons hovered and flew and lumbered around her. Some of the smaller winged ones looked almost human, a bit like garden-variety fairies, until you saw the malevolence on their little faces. Others resembled glittery insects mad with their own poisons. The bigger ones reminded her of alligators, long-snouted, slow-moving reptiles with mud-colored scales. Everything smelled of cool damp earth and smoking torchlight. There was a maddening familiarity about the demons and the tunnel and her endless walking.

* * * * *

“I can’t believe the fury of inanimate objects,” said Jessie, inviting Lynne inside, but Lynne remained with her back to the door, keys jingling in one hand.

Jessie bubbled on. “I swear they’re out to get me! First that weird knife, the one my mother liked, well, it cut me while it was still in the drainer, just leaped right out!”

Jessie hooted. “And just now I smashed my hand! On Mother’s In/Out box, the metal one like a cheese grater!”

Lynne glanced at her watch. “What was it you wanted?”

“Oh!” cried Jessie. “I forgot. Silly of me, isn’t it, to call you and then—wait a sec, I have something for you—”

She whirled and ran to the table, cracking her knee against a corner of her mother’s old knickknack shelf. A clay figurine
that Jessie had made in school fell off the shelf.

She stopped, took a deep breath. She could still feel her hands, wedging cool slippery clay, arm muscles burning, slamming the musky gray mass onto the board until it was malleable.

“Oh, Lynne! Don’t go,” she called. “It’s here somewhere, I just put it here last night…” She dug through breakfast dishes, bills, receipts, flinging aside empty sugar packets. “Ah, there, see, I knew it!” She pounced on a small cardboard box, snatched it up, ran to the door.

Lynne stared at the package. “What is it?”

“Why, it’s a salt-and-pepper set. Or maybe sugar and flour, I’m not exactly sure. It’s got those big holes in the metal screw tops, you know, and that nice swirly glass…”

“Why don’t you just throw all this crap out?”

Jessie blinked. It would be like throwing out her mother.

“Is this why you called me? I can’t use it.” Lynne slipped out the door.

Closing the door softly, Jessie realized she would not see Lynne again. Most of her friends had drifted away in the month since her mother’s death.

Even Ryan. Jessie’s fiancee had put up with her until last week, and joined the exodus.

Jessie had other companions now, but they were not human.

* * * * *

Port Hollister. Come summer the tourists would be out in force, crowding the little waterfront town, but in October it was too raw for any but the hardiest locals. Low tide; the air smelled of rotten eggs.

Jessie walked. She had walked when she had trouble with Ryan. She walked when Mother had gone into the hospital. She walked when she’d lost her job.

I must get back on track, she told herself, repeating it like a mantra, moving to its rhythm: I must get back on track.

The weather played her like a symphony, little airborne electrocutions everywhere. She pulled gloves onto her shaking hands and then her legs were shaking too.

What an interesting sweater, Jessie thought. Such a shade of green, almost moss, with all those embroideries, like a garden.

Jessie opened her mouth to say, Pardon me, where did you get that? And saw the girl’s eyes.

The were large eyes, brown eyes, rolling wide and frightened, not connecting with anything on the street.

As if the girl was walking through a gauntlet of demons.

Jessie had seen those eyes before. Mother, at the hospital, on that last day, eyes wild above the breathing tube.

Jessie froze. The girl loomed over her, the strange face rippling, changing to that of Mother’s, narrow and pinched, to Jessie’s, round and astonished, then back to the stranger’s. Features boiled in and out of hiding.

When Jessie looked up, Mother sat next to her. But now her eyes were calm.

The wind stilled.

Mother shook her head. “I’m so disappointed in you.”

“I know,” Jessie said, in a child’s voice.

“Why couldn’t you have turned out the way I wanted?”

Jessie felt her eyes prickle.

“Why did you let me die? Why didn’t you save me?”

“Save you?”

“I’m your mother. I gave you life. You should have saved my life in turn.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Lady? Lady? You okay?”

Jessie jerked her head up. A town cop stood over her. She knew her own demon-spitting eyes glared back at him and she quickly looked away.

“I’m fine. Perfectly fine.” She lurched to her feet and ran home.

* * * * *

There was a message from Ryan on the machine. He would come over tomorrow to take back the rest of his things. He suggested she get them ready.

Jessie played the message over and over until his words broke down to a disorder of noise.

She bumbled through the house, trying to gather Ryan’s belongings, bumping into furniture, smashing a knee, an elbow, fear driving her on. Then she collided with a chair, twisted, fell, and landed, thump, the breath knocked from her, Ryan’s clothes and books flying from her grasp.

That’s it, she thought. I have to calm down. This isn’t helping. I must get back on track.

She would go to her bedroom and try to relax with a book. She opened the bedroom door.

There was the tunnel.

Dark, cramped, looking like rough-hewn obsidian, the tunnel beckoned. As she groped forward, wondering where her bedroom had gone, Jessie found the tunnel was mud, black and cool and sticky.

The tunnel curved up to a low roof. Smoking torches were planted at irregular intervals. They gave off a stink of sulfur and an orange light.

Is this Hell? she wondered.

It felt surprisingly cool. She had thought Hell would be leaping with fires, but the air nuzzled pearly-soft against her skin. She could not see the tunnel’s beginning or end.

The sticky roof almost scraped her head as she edged forward. Bits of mud detached, falling with soft squelches.

Some of the small flying demons wore her mother’s face. Others, Ryan’s mouth or Lynne’s eyes. Some had no faces at all, but every one of them had teeth.

The Monarch-butterfly demon, and a grim lumbering one covered with warts, and one long and glittering like a dragonfly, spoke louder than the others. Each demon, as it told her a thing, bit off a piece of her clothing. You are selfish, said Monarch. Stupid, shrilled Needle, the dragonfly. Unlovable, grunted wart-covered Grim.

They attacked, voracious for the sustenance of her clothing, shredding it from her body. The air that had been so pearly-warm turned cold as iron. She ran, she struggled, she dodged, but demons flew at her like strafing jets. They snatched scrap after scrap of clothing. They kept at it, for hours, until she was down to shrinking, shivering skin.

They will leave me alone now, she thought.

But one demon, the dragonfly-like Needle, landed on her shoulder. It sank its minute teeth into her.

“Ow!” She swatted it away, and felt another hot sting when a piece of her skin came off in the demon’s teeth.

Other demons continued pulling skin away. She batted at them, rolled against the tunnel walls, ran, dodged. To no avail. Bites from Monarch and Needle were tiny. The big demons like Grim ripped away enormous patches.

But she stumbled on, further into the tunnel, trying to leave the demons behind.

She traveled for days in the company of demons. Weeks. Months. Years. Their words dripped in her ears.

You were not sad enough when your mother was in the hospital, said Needle; You’ll never find your way out, said Grim.

She walked until she was one open wound, and all she could smell was the copper tang of her own blood. She retained one secret, hidden piece of skin, and clung to the thought that she still had something.

One day she saw a shape up ahead, huddled against the wall of the tunnel. At first she thought it was one of the big demons. But as she drew closer she saw it was human.

She had almost forgotten how humans looked. And this one seemed familiar. She searched her memory: Lavender scent. Reddish hair. Hands that slapped.

She stopped, Monarch and Needle flying around her head, Grim nudging up against her knees. As she leaned closer she could see the woman had grown very old, so ancient that she too was laid bare, like an anatomy chart.

“You have some skin left,” said the stranger.

Jessie remembered the skin on the bottom of her right foot.

“I want it. You owe it to me.”

Almost by reflex Jessie reached down and detached the last of her skin, holding it like a leaf. The stranger snatched it and pressed it to the middle of her forehead. The skin grew, covering her head to toe. “Is that all you have?”

Jessie nodded.

“You’ve always disappointed me.” she said.

It had a familiar ring. The demons were in her. When she died they went free. First into the knife and the letter holder.

“Go away,” she whispered. “Leave me alone!”

Mother shrugged. “If that’s what you want.” She turned, and was soon lost around the slight curve of the tunnel.

That, too, was familiar. Mother, leaving Jessie to care for her collected junk, junk that bit and scratched, leaving Jessie to look after the demons, in their company forever.

A hot coal of rage grew in her throat.

“I hate you! I’m glad you’re dead! I hope it hurt!” Jessie screamed herself hoarse. Then she screamed grief and sorrow. She screamed until her voice gave up.

But Mother was really gone now.

She walked, driven by a need to escape. There had been a door. Doors were hard rectangles with round knobs that made them open. She limped on.

The demons seemed to want to help now; big reptilian Grim nudged her forward, and little Monarch and Needle led the way.

As she traveled, the mud lining the walls detached itself in bits, and where she brushed up against it, clung to her, forming a new skin, cooling the fire of her raw flesh.

She walked for a few years this way, equalized, neither hot nor cold.

She began to laugh one day, soundless. What was it people possessed, that she kept bumping up blindly against them, asking, begging? She wondered if it had been similar to pieces of skin.

She must be very old. Maybe as old as the mother. She wished that she had a voice, even to exchange inanities with Monarch or Grim: Isn’t the mud so much blacker today?

It was many years later when she saw the patch of light at the end of the tunnel.

The demons began to fall back, Grim and the other big ones curling into the darkness of the tunnel floor, the little ones, Monarch and Needle, hovering in front of her face, finally settling into the walls.

The patch of light grew brighter. She put out a hand to touch it and almost fell over. Stumbled, caught herself, and looked around, not recognizing her own home.

Black and swampy, she sat on the floor, blinking against the brightness. Then she scraped off the mud, leaving it in a heap amid empty trash bags and overflowing boxes.

She was astounded to see that fresh new skin had grown underneath. She was astounded to see that it was still October.

She felt tough and cool and elastic in her whole being.

She remembered the message on the answering machine: Ryan would be coming by later to retrieve his things. She got up to tidy the room.

And stopped.

What was the use of seeing Ryan now? She had no name. She had no voice.

She pushed the black mud into a plastic bag and closed it tight to keep it malleable. Clay came from mud. Her hands remembered what to do with clay. She put it in her car. Drove toward Taos, New Mexico. She had always wanted to be a sculptor.